Sunday, November 2, 2008

Oct. 24- Departure to Lhasa

Friday morning we had our midterm in Chinese class and I found I had a very hard time focusing. I was not the only one, however, because everyone was excited about their upcoming trips. Selina and I definitely did not study as much as we should have because we were too busy running back and forth to each others room saying how excited we were to finally be leaving. Overall the midterm was not a huge success but I managed alright under the circumstances :) After the exam was over we came back to Tonghe to triple check that we had everything and then just sat around and waited for our departure time to come. To waste some time we went to send the postcards that we had written and then went down to the ATM to get money for our journey. Of course, the ATM by school wasn't working so we had to take the bus to Wal-Mart and use the ATM over there. We returned to our apartment with an hour before take off so we checked our stuff one last time and headed out at 5:30 to head to the train station.

We decided to take the bus and subway to the train station to save money. Trying to shove your way onto a bus with a backpack, duffel, and food sack during rush hour on a Friday afternoon is quite an adventure. We literally pushed our way on and had to stand right next to the door and try not to fall out whenever the door opened to let more people on. When we got to our stop we gladly jumped off the bus and entered the subway station. I got stuck trying to go through the entrance where we slide our railway card. My bag got wedged in the turney thing and after I got my bag unstuck my shorts got caught behind me and I had to jump to get it unstuck because I didn't have a free hand. I'm sure I looked ridiculous! After clumsily making my way to the platform, we boarded the subway and sat until we got to the train station platform. As usual we didn't know which way the train station was when we got out on the street but I recognized the characters for train on a sign so we eventually found the station with about an hour to spare. We ate KFC for dinner in the station and then boarded the train at 7:30. We were so glad that we forked out the extra money for a soft sleeper and we both had bottom bunks and shared the compartment with two Chinese men. We were so excited the first couple of hours and then we realized that we still had 2 days on the train left to go!!! Let the adventure begin :)

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